Rivière Noire
Sand, curves and whitewater. The Noire is a fascinating river to paddle since it's primarily through sandier soil which makes for an incredibly winding narrow river with no lakes. When the river touches on Canadian shield granite, it makes for some real fun whitewater. The downside is that most of the campsites are on beaches in the inside of switchback turns in the river. While camping on sand can be fun for a few hours, it gets annoying pretty fast.
Since we're primarily riverphiles, it was nice to not have to cross large lakes, or any lakes at all, but there was a trade off. Eventually, we started to miss the long view and the sections of constant switch backs started to lose their charm by the end.
A nice part is that if you get out at the old Black River Inn take-out, it's over 10 km of almost constant fast moving swifts to float your way home. It was a nice way to finish a river.
The Noire is pretty easy to access with a reasonable portage road compared to other rivers in the region. It has very few portages and if you're not into people, you'll not likely run into many on this river. We don't mind encountering fellow paddlers and it's nice to connect with fellow paddlers. We only encountered two groups on our trip.
We were happy to have run the Noire in late June 2025 and enjoyed the whitewater, but it didn't have the same draw to pull us back again like its sister river the Dumoine. Still, it was an excellent trip and we were quite satisfied to have paddled another great Ottawa Valley river.
